WWF "strongly urges NASCO members to follow the
advice of scientists and adopt all necessary measures
to restore runs of wild Atlantic salmon".

Humans responsible

Over the last century, it says, salmon have
disappeared from more than 75% of Baltic rivers, and
catches in Scotland and Ireland today are roughly
25% of what they were in 1970.

WWF says human activities are to blame for all the
problems besetting the species.

It singles out:

dams and other river engineering works which
block the fish from passage to suitable
spawning grounds industrial, domestic and agricultural pollution salmon farming, which WWF says spreads
diseases and parasites to wild populations. It
says almost a million farmed salmon escape
annually in Norway alone. Interbreeding
between farmed and wild stocks is also a
problem, and WWF says the possible introduction of genetically-modified salmon "could eventually wipe out wild stocks".

WWF is also concerned
about what are called "mixed-salmon fisheries" -
the practice of catching fish indiscriminately from
several rivers, some of which may contain healthy
stocks while others do not.

Henning Roed, of WWF-Norway, who is
co-ordinating the group's research, told BBC News
Online: "The only answer is to close the mixed fisheries altogether. "There is no other way to safeguard salmon in rivers where stocks are already low.

Resumption threat
"We want NASCO to agree catch limits based on
scientific recommendations. Several countries where
open-ocean salmon fishing used to go on - Norway,
Greenland and Canada - have bought out their fleets.

"It's mainly fleets from the UK and Ireland that are
continuing to do it, within their territorial waters. So it's a matter for their national governments.

"The Faroese, who caught just eight tonnes of salmon
last year, are threatening to resume it on a larger
scale if the UK and Ireland don't cut back."

This is an important issue and one would hope there would be a summit held by Babbit or someone to mediate the international repercussions of the matter. Although much more subdued, there is a US / Canada tension in the PNW as well (as you know).

Although some would argue against big government, this is specifically the kind of chaos that needs a higher authority to align. The tribes are running amok in spite of each other and those with a conscience get burned.

The statistic of over a million escapees a year is staggering and unacceptable. This is clearly a new kind of pollution - gene pollution. It should be taken with as much seriousness as any chemical spill.